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SETI@Home Transitions To BOINC
SeaDour writes "The team at SETI@Home have finally released their highly-anticipated new client software based on the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) software platform. This new platform promises transparent version upgrades, more efficient work unit distribution, and the ability to seamlessly integrate other distributed computing projects that are also using the BOINC standard. For now, SETI@Home is allowing both the Classic and BOINC clients to run, but eventually they will shut down the Classic data server and force everyone to upgrade. You can read more about the transition here."
SETI seems like a bit of a waste of energy compared to Folding at Home. It's not that I don't believe in extraterrestrials or anything, I even think that SETI is a pretty worthwhile project but compared to curing some of the ailments folding works on...well yeah.
vampirical
A very long time ago, I heard that SETI@Home was running low on work-units because their client was so popular that they were just burning through them... Did they restructure it? What happened. I remember when I heard that I started downloading work-units that were taken by the dishes more recently then I had been seening too...
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
The team at SETI@Home have finally released Bonic
On Bonic web page: Status BOINC is under development. We are conducting a beta test of BOINC using the SETI@home and Astropulse applications. The public release will be announced on the SETI@home web site. Several other distributed computing projects are evaluating BOINC.
Bonic has been "released" for use for a long time; I thought when a release annoucment arrives then the product is no longer beta. So which is it - Released means ready for use or does it mean Please beta test now?
Does the new client include methods to block the methods used to spoof the current SETI@Home client?
Interestingly enough, the new client has the option to compile it yourself. The old client didn't have this option, or atleast it was very difficult to find, _if_ it was available. Now maybe it can be ported to archs that were previously unsupported.
SS1 wouldn't have sidereal motion, it isn't high enough. Also, there's the fact that its only up there for a couple minutes. But basically, it wouldn't "look" like a signal from extraplanetary sources.
The Moon, well, they would say "It's coming from the moon". I suspect there are ways to tell if someone is bouncing it off the moon... like the fact that it would be an on again, off again signal in synch with the rotation of the planet.
To successfully hoax the SETI program would require a *lot* of effort and smarts.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
"BOINC transparently and securely downloads new application versions. This lets us upgrade and extend SETI@home without requiring you to download and install new software. "
Well, if I can't turn this feature off, they've lost my cycles. I don't even allow my OS vendor to perform automatic downloads of "new versions" of programs.
For those with the tinfoil hats, the Patriot Act could be used to force Berzerkeley to download random "interesting" ware for the Feds, and keep quiet about it under penalty of law, under the umbrella of looking for terrorist activity. This ain't Java playing in a secure sandbox either.
Well-formed XML facilitates communication and interoperability, because standard XML parsers can grok it, making it easier to write new implementations that understand the same XML format.
It found that you can ask home users with more computing power than they personally use to donate their compute cycles, if they find the project interesting enough and your work is Very Embarrassingly Parallel.
Furthermore, as broadband becomes more popular, the work will not need to be quite so parallel. And as more devices have actual CPUs and go online, you could ask more of even more appliances--for example, one could reasonably run BOINC on their Tivo or Xbox.
That, as it's been said, is an important discovery in and of itself. The world is more lacking of VEP compute problems than CPU time, apparently, but maybe that can be changed; and maybe that can be changed on a problem that is important. Part of designing a VEP task is thinking about the issue differently and configuring your compute interactions differently; now that SETI has demonstrated the possibility, and has been expanded by BOINC, perhaps it will attract more interest and spur adoption of VEP worksets.
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$tar -xvf
Even worse -- and the reason I won't be transitioning to BOINC -- is that it apparently downloads and installs new versions of the applications without user knowledge or approval. It's my system and I insist on maintaining my delusion of being the one in control of what gets downloaded and installed when.
I had heard about the eventual switch-over some months ago, but never found the time to play around with the beta, so I took the opportunity now to install the client and check it out.
On Mac OS X, all went well, and my PowerBook is munching on it's first unit, fans spinning. However, when I tried to start the client on a Sun box at work, it failed with "ld.so.1: ./boinc_3.18_sparc-sun-solaris2.7: fatal: libstdc++.so.3: open failed: No such file or directory." A quick Google confirmed my suspicions: the client is linked against the GCC stdlib, which is not a standard part of Solaris. Now, that's easy enough to fix if you've worked with Solaris before: just go to sunfreeware.com, and find a suitable binary package to put on.
However, someone not knowing about Solaris, GCC, and sunfreeware.com might be a bit stumped. And the boinc/setiboinc boards reveal that quite a number of beta testers are confused about this, not only on Solaris but also on Linux. It's not completely obvious which GCC/libgcc packages contains libstc++.so.3 (as opposed to .2.x or .4.x).
The real kicker is that I couldn't find any hint of this problem or a solution on the site. I probably looked in all the wrong places in the last half hour... And I couldn't find a feedback form or email address either. This definitly needs to be improved if they want people to move over to boinc.
The FAQ didn't answer that question--does anyone know?
Lets see what we can cover:
BOINC isn't nearly as usful to society as Folding@home, AIDS research@home, help feed starving disabled puppies in war torn african nations@home, etc.
BOINC != Seti@Home. BOINC is a step up the ladder from Seti, it provides the infrastructure for multiple projects. *you* choose the project to attach yourself to and contribute time to. In an ultra-perfect hippie world, Folding@home would use the BOINC infrastructure. Instead you get to help out who you want.
I ain't trustin no Berkeley hippies to silently install no black helicopter, tinfoil hat disablin' technology on my system.
Then don't use it. If you ran seti, you really had no way of knowing what was coming down the pipe now did you? You opened up a nice big gaping connection into your system while trusting that the work units weren't poison pills and that Berkeley's infrastructure hadn't been comprimised. Run the client on a non-critical machine, put it outside your firewall if it makes you happy.
Scientific progress goes BOINC!
You're very clever. You're the only person that ever thought of that.
Aliens will enslave the earth when we make contact!!!!!
You really shouldn't have rented Battlefield Earth.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
While you might be right, I hardly believe that a large number of users are running their computers 24/7 just to appear on a semi-obscure top 100-list.
Also, I followed your link and I like the new system much better- it awards credits based on CPU time/clock rate instead of just number of work units completed. Thus one credit will be more uniform across all platforms. What's wrong with that?
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
I've recently decided to uninstall SETI and leave the search after staying with it from the begining in '99 because one small graph in an article of Scientific American has kept sticking in my mind. Around 2000-2001 SciAm published an article that included this graph of SETI's search results (negative, natch) for the galaxy.
Even back then you can see that a large portion of the interesting parameter space has been excluded; it's been 3 years and not a peep. SETI's negative result is very, very important but it feels like it's time to move on.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
I have to agree. It was with some sadness that I uninstalled the old SETI@home client before installing BOINC. The old client was compact, quick, and friendly. In contrast, the BOINC interface seems cheerless and industrial.
If tonight had been my first experience with the SETI@home project, I would have uninstalled it completely and told all my friends to avoid it. I refuse to keep any program that crashes my system when I try to use its basic functions.
That said, I really like SETI@home, and I'm willing to stick it out with the new BOINC client. I only hope the most egregious bugs are removed. Ever since I was a kid, I have wanted to contribute to the search for extraterrestrial life. Since I didn't grow up to be a professional astronomer, I would continue to gladly contribute my spare clock cycles even if the SETI client was much worse than it is now.
I think that SETI@home does important work, but I worry that BOINC might become a classic second system, with plenty of new functionality and configurability, yet big, cumbersome, and bloated in comparison to the original version.
Christ! It's just a sig, not a definition of anything. I've used countless different sigs over the years. This particular sig is merely a response to the countless bumper stickers I've read over the years pronouncing that God exists, we must obey Jesus, Darwin is wrong and countless other articles of religious faith.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.